Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

The Cosmic Monster

(The Strange World of Planet X, UK, 1958)

Also known as Cosmic Monsters, The Crawling Terror, and The Crawling Horror. Wow! That’s a lot of titles for a quite small film only 75 minutes long. And it’s actually sort of appropriate, since in many ways this crazy thing looks like it was cobbled together from several movies, like Frankenstein’s monster. In parts, it actually has some reasonably rational discussion of things like the ionosphere. The scenes are static and discursive, but what the hell. It’s low-budget. Then there are really stupid things. In this small village in England, every trip from anywhere to anywhere entails a trip through a phony woods, where mutant killers lurk. And even worse, we get into Ed Wood territory, with a laughable flying saucer, and stock footage of insects that we are supposed to believe are huge. Then it all just more or less stops. People are seen reacting to a scene they apparently didn’t have the money to actually film, of a building blowing up and the saucer taking off. A very, very, very bad film.